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Saturday, October 14, 2017

Harvey Weinstein: The Back Story

The New York Times last week broke the story of Hollywood producer
Harvey Weinstein’s long record of sexual harassment.

This had been going on for thirty years or more.How could no one know the story?

But of course people knew about
Harvey Weinstein. Like the New York Times,
for instance. Sharon Waxman, a former reporter at the Times, writes in The Wrap how she had the story on
Weinstein in 2004—and then he bullied the Times
into dropping it. Matt Damon and Russell Crowe even called her directly to get
her to back off the story.

See, Weinstein was protected.Two things brought him down.First, Weinstein owned significant resources
in the journalist community, resources that were looking to stay on good terms
with a major producer; through this, he was greatly able to control the story:

It’s because the media industry
that once protected him has collapsed. The magazines that used to publish the
stories Miramax optioned can’t afford to pay for the kind of reporting and
storytelling that translates into screenplays.

It is because the best reporting is coming from bloggers,
from the internet.No one is paying for
the privilege of reading so-called “news” put out by the gatekeepers.So-called “fake news” is winning the day.

But this is nothing.Second:

Rebecca Traister says the stories
are coming out now because “our consciousness has been raised.” Between Bill
Cosby and Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Donald Trump, argues Traister, people
are now accustomed to speaking and hearing the truth about famous, sexually
abusive men.

This is wrong. It has nothing to do
with “raised consciousness”—or else she wouldn’t have left off that list the
one name obviously missing.

Yes, this is wrong, and it is wrong because the name left
off of the list points to the primary reason that a) Weinstein has remained
protected, and b) why he no longer is:

Which brings us, finally, to the
other reason the Weinstein story came out now: Because the court over which
Bill Clinton once presided, a court in which Weinstein was one part jester, one
part exchequer, and one part executioner, no longer exists.

A thought experiment: Would the
Weinstein story have been published if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency?
No, and not because he is a big Democratic fundraiser. It’s because if the
story was published during the course of a Hillary Clinton presidency, it wouldn’t
have really been about Harvey Weinstein. Harvey would have been seen as a proxy
for the president’s husband and it would have embarrassed the president, the
first female president.

Bill Clinton offered
get-out-of-jail-free cards to a whole army of sleazeballs, from Jeffrey Epstein
to Harvey Weinstein to the foreign donors to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Conclusion

Perhaps this is one of the main reasons that Hollywood is so
up in arms about Clinton losing, Trump winning, and Putin.Sleazeballs, every single one of them; sleazeballs
that would see us in a nuclear war before giving up their corrupt and empty
lifestyles.

Hillary did not need to look across Middle America to find the
deplorables; she needed only to look at the tool next to her…and to look in the
mirror.

5 comments:

Amazing... all the players who perpetuate the nastier aspects of life. I think it was the late Jeff Huber who wrote about how everyone at or near the top has something to hide. Easier to control that way. All the more reason for their attempts at silencing and demonetizing the flow of information.

And through it all, Teflon Bill keeps rolling along. He must have the goods on a great many people. Well, that and those surrounding him dropping like Star Trek security redshirts.